Now consider the
growth of computational power and the accompanying explosion of data from the
perspective of a corporation. Data volume growth today far exceeds budget and
revenue growth rates for many organizations. Big Data can become a Big Problem for
Chief Information Officers (CIOs) and Chief Legal Officers alike. It can easily
overwhelm IT budgets and current processes for e-discovery, records and
retention management, archiving and leveraging information assets. As a result, companies are investing in
software that can help them dig out of this data hoarding hole and automate defensible
disposal of debris.

So today we’re announcing that we’ve entered into a definitive agreement to acquire StoredIQ
Inc., a privately held company based in Austin,
Texas. With this agreement, IBM adds to its prior
investments in Information Lifecycle Governance (ILG) by adding StoredIQ
capabilities to rapidly find and use unstructured information of value, respond
more efficiently to litigation and regulatory events, lower information cost as
data ages, and dispose of data that has outlived its purpose to lower cost and
risk. Think of the StoredIQ agreement as the latest example of how IBM is
bringing an unparalleled commitment to the science of information economics to
shape the daily lives of CIOs, legal teams, and line of business staff.

In fact, IBM’s
Information Lifecycle Governance suite improves information economics by
helping companies lower the total cost of managing data while increasing the
value derived from it by:

Enabling
business to realize full information value as its context erodes with in-place
analytics, content management and collaboration

StoredIQ software provides highly scalable analysis and in-place
governance of disparate and distributed email, files, and other content
repositories. This includes the ability to discover, analyze, monitor, retain,
collect, de-duplicate and dispose of data. Organizations can now more
efficiently use and govern their unstructured data wherever it resides to
increase its value and eliminate unnecessary cost, risk and data.

Once
the acquisition is completed, StoredIQ will add to IBM’s ILG portfolio and bolsters
its advantage in improving information economics by enabling customers to
rapidly achieve defensible disposal and related cost and risk takeout. We
intend to expand the existing integration with StoredIQ and IBM ILG products to
deepen cost-savings and total cost of ownership benefits for customers. We
further plan to incorporate StoredIQ into our ILG business in Enterprise
Content Management, which is part of IBM’s Software Group. Building on prior
acquisitions of PSS Systems in 2010 and Vivisimo in 2012, IBM adds to its
strength in rapid discovery, effective governance and timely disposal of data.

This
transaction is subject to customary closing conditions and is expected to close
in the first quarter of 2013.